World Philosophy Day is the perfect time to understand, with Merlau-Ponty, that “true philosophy is to relearn how to see the world”.
World Philosophy Day was instituted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco). Every year it is celebrated on the third Thursday of November. In 2007, the events alluding to the date take place on November 15th, a day during which, among other things, what philosophy is for will be discussed.
I want to understand that this date reinforces the idea that philosophy is not dead. If she is mortal, she will die on the day the last human being is banished from the face of the Earth. Because? Because philosophy has as essence of its reason for being the human capacity to use its own cognitive complexity to represent the world and the concrete life inserted in it.
There is no way to prevent men and women from thinking about life, representing what exists, analyzing the thoughts already manifested historically or criticize the representations that result in visions of the most different hues. To interdict thinking is to interdict the human.
Were it not for that, philosophers would not be concerned with showing that philosophy can be an additional instrument. assisting human beings in this task of thinking, representing, judging, deciding and acting with the criticality that they are inherent. In this sense, philosophy has a lot to do today.
The usefulness and importance of the philosophical attitude may lie in the acts of evaluating the various dogmatisms that haunt the world and that are impervious to dialogue, as well as the ideological operations of human beings that manipulate the real, fanaticisms that blind and destructive actions around the planet that put all manifestations at risk of extinction of life. These themes provide a strong program of action for philosophy, which can be summarized in just one: making people see.
Why see? Because philosophy is attitude. She is not just speech. It is not mere contemplation. Not pure idleness. As Seneca said in his Letters to Lucílio, “Philosophy teaches to act, not to speak”. But, understanding that speaking is a form of human action, a way of saying what you see, I am of the opinion that what Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian philosopher, writing to Unesco on the occasion of the commemoration of this World Day of Philosophy is noteworthy.
According to Gaarder, thinking of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, made by the United Nations (UN), perhaps it is time to think about a Universal Declaration of Human Duties, as Kant would have suggested when he thought of a universal imperative to establish planetary union between the peoples.
I note this idea that Gaarder seeks in Kant because I'm not sure whether imperatives are sufficient for human action in the world to be better oriented. However, I am sure that international organizations and globalized philosophers resort to Kant and the universal imperative when they want to echo the idea of tolerance. It's there, in every Unesco text.
Yes, in a globalized world, the urgency of knowing how to live with differences and the urgency to practice respect and conviviality civilized are universal human values that could substantiate that declaration of duties, because these are important values and no one denies. The recurring problem, not just on these occasions, is that they always want us to be tolerant of intolerable things. Now this is difficult to accept. Certain tolerances that want to make us practice are intolerable.
For example, data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on the faces of poverty in the world gives the dimension of human irrationality with regard to (in) social justice and show the obstacles to a planetary union of nations as the Kantians.
These data speak for themselves. Well over a billion human beings in the world survive on less than a dollar a day. Two billion seven hundred million men and women have less than two dollars to support themselves overnight.
In the wake of this misery, six million children die from easily curable diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia. There are regions of the globe where less than half of children go to primary school. Less than twenty percent of them make it to high school. 114 million children do not receive any education at all. 584 million of them are involved in illiteracy.
I ask: is it possible to be tolerant with those and with the structures that feed this survival and death machine? Is it on the basis of this kind of structure that a declaration of duties intends to delineate the union between peoples?
Now, the UNDP text assures me that, every day, 800 million people fall asleep hungry, 300 million of them children... should I tolerate this attempt on life? This is inequality, not difference. The difference was made to be respected and lived. Inequality and injustice we cannot tolerate.
It is not possible to be complacent when this report tells me that every three minutes and six seconds a person dies of hunger across the Earth. Is it possible to be tolerant of this holocaust?
This macabre state of affairs leads to politics, a field in which I witness the insult, the impudence and the underestimation of our intelligence: when politicians place themselves above the law and ethics, almost always to perpetuate structures that generate life for the few and death for the many... with this policy should i be tolerant?
When "being" is not power, when "knowing" is not power, but when "having" is effective power, even swallowing and shaping political practice, also in the face of this, I must adopt the silent stance of someone who tolerate?
Should I be tolerant of this unjust economic model and this obtuse political regime, which level the culture by the most grotesque things that can exist in this sector? Do I have to accept this mass culture made by quantity, not the minimum of what is considered quality and good?
If the World Philosophy Day was instituted to make the human conscience deepen its own criticality in relation to itself, to judgments that have participated in our time and the actions that people have taken in the world, so I must ask: what is dignity human? Are current economics, politics and culture at the service of this dignity or what?
Continuing, I ask: what is it worth to have a bill of rights? If a declaration of rights has not added humanism to us, will a declaration of duties solve our follies? Will it be possible to make, through duties, all the peoples of the world unite around human values that bring them peace and harmony? I have my doubts there.
As long as the economy is used to produce inequalities, as long as the use of power is made to enshrine privilege and disrespecting values and as long as culture is used to dull and blind, I think the task of philosophy becomes huge.
In the situation in which we see ourselves, the most philosophical thing to be done is to make people who love wisdom turn their infant eyes to the real that surrounds us and scream, loud and clear, like the child character of the Dane Hans Christian Andersen: “the king is naked". This is the Herculean task of philosophy.
And hopefully the king doesn't run away, or try to kill the boy, or say the boy is mad. Hopefully the king's acolytes do the same: accept the revealing cry. I very much wish that the king could assume his own nudity and get dressed as soon as possible. Life cannot agonize under our eyes that do not want to see. Without seeing, how to take the step, how to take action?
Yes, the king must see. Even to choose the clothes you'll wear after discovering yourself in fur. For my part, I have a suggestion of clothing: humanity. This would be an outfit that would suit him well, above all so that he would understand what philosophical knowledge is for on this World Day of Philosophy.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
PerWilson Correia
Columnist Brazil School
Philosophy - Brazil School